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Jumping back into Development world....need advice!

Hello Forum-
I am trying to figure out a path of re-training for myself. I used to be a programmer (back in the late 1980’s-mid1990’s)…mainframe applications programmer…Cobol, PL/1, MVS/JCL, VSAM, DB2/SQL. Took a long time off from 1994-2003 to raise children… and then never really went back to programming. Instead I focused on fun stuff like graphic design, web ‘design’ (just customizing templates and later, Wordpress themes), and other light IT stuff. Of course I know HTML, CSS and can follow and tweek PhP and Javascript, but I haven’t gotten into those languages very deeply at all. I understand Object Oriented concepts but even that was just gearing up as I left the workforce in 1994. And now I am in place where I need the stability and stronger income potential and I’m trying to figure out if I can quickly pick up a certification in some type of language and raise my income from approx. $40K to approx. $60k. Is this possible and if so, what area should I focus on? And where can I find a good online training program that would ideally take 6 months or less to complete? I am stumped. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I'm more into the server-side of things, and in that respect, PHP is not a bad choice, though there is more money (but fewer total jobs) for Ruby (on Rails) developers. If you seek to up your PHP skills, I'd recommend the book PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice by Matt Zandstra, and maybe spend $10 for a month at www.laracasts.com to see some of Jeffrey's excellent tutorials on the Laravel framework for PHP and some general PHP stuff, too. Getting comfortable with database design concepts and SQL is also very important.

"Please give us a simple answer, so that we don't have to think, because if we think, we might find answers that don't fit the way we want the world to be."
~ Terry Pratchett in Nation